Environmental Justice in the Context of Rural Areas: The Case from Croatia

When we think about environmental attitudes and behaviors, broader theoretical frameworks and empirical measures often do not distinguish enough between urban and rural populations. We could argue that in Europe today, urban-rural differences are increasingly disappearing with the processes of modernization and urbanization, but we also cannot ignore studies that warn us of the persistence of the urban-rural divide. In this paper, we therefore argue that some of the main ways of thinking and measuring environmental attitudes and behaviors should be reconsidered with more sensitivity to the specificities of rural lifestyles. This will contribute to a better understanding of environmental awareness in rural areas and recognize the importance of rural traditional knowledge and adaptation strategies to various climate and environmental challenges, all of which can help shape more effective, informed and equitable environmental policies for rural areas. Within this framework, we will present and interpret the empirical results of the nationally representative survey among the adult rural population of Croatia (N=831) conducted between 2022 and 2023 on environmental attitudes, concern and socio-demographic characteristics as predictors of environmental behavior. The results show that, on average, rural Croats rate in the middle of the pro-environmental behavior (PEB) scale. All predictors except gender were statistically significant, with the strongest being environmental concern, age and ecocentric attitudes. However, some results show the specificities of the rural sample (e.g. some PEB items scoring higher than others or anthropocentrism being a weak but positive predictor of PEB), which adds to our understanding of rural PEB and the factors that influence it. This paper was supported by two projects: “SECRURAL” (UIP-2019-04-5257) funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (2020-2024) and “Environmental justice in the context of rural areas: The case from Croatia” funded by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb (2025).